CD PROJEKT RED has released a PC hotfix for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to address some of the issues introduced by its new next-gen update, which began rolling out on December 14 at midnight GMT on PC and Xbox Series X|S, and midnight local time on PS5, bringing a range of modern features that include ray-traced global illumination and ambient occlusion to the 2015 action RPG.
“We’ve just released a hotfix for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC which should improve overall stability and performance of the game, and fix GOG & Steam overlays. The game version won’t change,” CD PROJEKT RED wrote regarding the update, which was released today, December 19.
“At the same time, the next-gen update has been released for the Origin version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” the company added. “The game version is going to be 4.0.”
According to a lengthy troubleshooting thread on r/Witcher, some of the problems that The Witcher 3 players have encountered after installing its next-gen update include crashes, memory leaks, save files that won’t load, and graphical oddities, such as “awful-looking” grass.
Some GeForce owners (e.g., GeForce RTX 2070/3070) have gone so far as to claim that the game is “unplayable” with ray tracing enabled in another reddit thread that was posted to document performance and visual issues introduced by the The Witcher 3’s next-gen update.
“Our teams are working on further improving the experience on all platforms,” CD PROJEKT RED promised in its announcement for the PC hotfix that released today.
Patch notes for The Witcher 3’s next-gen update can confirm that it introduces the following PC-specific features for the game:
- “ULTRA+” graphical settings on PC, which significantly increases the visual fidelity of the game
- Number of background characters
- Shadow quality
- Grass density
- Texture quality
- Foliage visibility range
- Terrain quality
- Water quality
- Detail level
The Witcher 3’s next-gen update also adds support for the latest iteration of NVIDIA’s upscaling technology, DLSS 3, which appears to be exclusive to the company’s GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs at this time.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt originally released for PS4, Windows, and Xbox One platforms on May 19, 2015.